*The Number Crunchers*

Fortunately, the Number Crunchers were too brilliant (and too realistic) to be muzzled by power-hungry eschatologists, doomsday sayers, or dataphobic creationists. Before Creationist and Propaganda SFC officers even placed orders to condemn them to cryogenic prison or before TAP nihilistics officers had filed orders for immediate prolonged suspended animation or before a joint SFC-TAP legal team had filed the correct global e-paperwork for extralegal rendition to one of the non-Firster nations depending on international digital aid, the Number Crunchers had already infected the Deep Intranet with the help of Anonymous and other hacktivists operating in the deep interplanetary supranet and the GI (galactic intranet) with complex self-generating data viruses that replicated themselves faster than they could be erased by underpaid SFC “virtue hackers” or located by search and destroy viruses or Nullware. Within a month, everyone who received news injections in their ISC as haptic pulses or who read independent digital media on their EMOS learned that the asteroid’s trajectory was (and had always been) specious, politically constructed to control mass behavior and to suppress critical thinking (the way the political parties all over the world used to at the turn of the century).